Saturday, June 19, 2010

Let's start with the obvious: "Church basement" and "good museum design" do not normally go together. I speak from experience, having worked
for a year in a church basement populated by peace organizations. Narrow hallways, cement walls, ragged door frames. Not what I personally would think is the stuff meant to transport people into another time and place.Well, a visit this weekend to Detroit's "Underground Railroad Living Museum" has shown me otherwise. The museum is located in the basement of the First Congregational Church (which, incidentally, has got a beautiful sanctuary with an organ that I'll bet shakes the floor when played). Small groups of people -- I went through with a school group -- watch a short video history of the Underground Railroad, get a brief overview of the church's history, and then descend into the basement where they assume the role of escaped slaves. (We were given wristbands that said "slave" on them.) Our conductor, Simon, was a large man dressed in a torn hat and long, tattered clothes and using a walking stick. The only didactic element in the basement was at the very beginning, when Simon talked about and showed illustrations depicting the Middle Passage, mostly for the benefit of schoolchildren, who I suspect are the primary audience. (Little shout out here to a fantastic database on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.) From there, we passed through "the door of no return," (signifying the exit point from Africa for many captive Africans during the slave trade), and found ourselves on our Louisiana plantation, Oak Alley.

The scenes that followed all took place at night -- to represent how fugitive slaves often traveled in the dark, and to create a mood of peril and uncertainty. Conveniently, this also meant that all the modern touches of the church basement were obscured! From a design perspective, then, the darkness served the museum. As we moved from room to room and scene to scene, we met various characters. In an early and especially gripping scene, an elderly slave woman took us into her quarters and told us of the dangers ahead and urged us to stick together in our travels. Shortly afterward, as we left the plantation, another old-timer yelled us out of his quarters, saying that we were foolish to attempt an escape. Then, already en route, a pregnant woman came running up to us screaming, pleading with us to let her join us -- would we? After traversing a good distance, a Quaker woman hustled us into her safe house, only to urge us on when a loud banging on the door portended an evil fate for us all. We traveled on, going over some treacherous terrain, and at last arrived at the Ohio River -- a large open room with a dip in the floor that was cleverly converted into a waterway with the use of some floor paint and lighting. Once we passed the bridge, we were free, and back upstairs. Mercifully, the video we'd watched had communicated much of the basic information about the Underground Railroad, and the basement portion of the tour was not overloaded with facts and figures: it was more concerned with experience. I was impressed by how simple touches -- well-placed blue-gel lights, props hiding a fuse box or other machinery, the sound of crickets, just a lantern lighting each scene, dark cloth on the walls and passageways to shroud us, and props like a whipping post or river rats -- all created a rich atmosphere. With Simon "conducting" us slaves ("passengers" or "packages" in the language of the day), some of the central challenges of escape were dramatized: to stay with the slavery you knew, or to risk it in the unknown wilds; whether to have others join you or to deny them for fear they'd be endangering the group; how to judge whom you can trust, and how far? These dimly lit scenes and this cast of actors were well calibrated to engage the imagination -- not so underdone as to leave visitors confused, nor so overdone as to leave us no room to think. (The physical museum is nicely complemented by an online component, right here.)

The picture above is of (I think) the museum's first cast of actors, and comes from this pageon the museum's website. The museum was the brainchild of Rev. Dr. Lottie Jones-Hood, the first African American pastor of the Detroit congregation, and the first woman. The previous location of First Congregational Church of Detroit is believed to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and the Congregational Church denomination was historically involved in the abolition movement.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

LISTEN THE NEW PODCAST EPISODE ONLINE HERE, OR BETTER YET SUBSCRIBE TO THE FREE PODCAST ON iTUNES HERE.

I'm totally bonkers for the Neighborhood Story Project, a New Orleans-based organization that works with community writers to tell "our stories, told by us." Among their various projects, the organization is most well-known for the dozen books created by students at John McDonogh Senior High School in New Orleans, in which the writers interview family, friends, neighbors, store owners, and other locals to create rich portraits of the places where they live, and the people who populate those places. (They also have books by adults, like one by and about Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club, or The House of Dance and Feathers.)

Here's the thing: the books are really good. You might be inclined to think, "well, books written by students, probably just some stapled-together 'zine that you'd only check out because you know the people who make them and feel obliged to read 'em." On the contrary, the books are beautifully printed, and more importantly, they're funny, entertaining, full of feeling, and tell great stories.

Abram Himelstein has eye-opening things to say about how people should own their stories, why paying "sources" is not the worst thing in the world, and he reads from one of the recent books. Check out the podcast episode, and don't wait, go buy some of the books for yourself. (All the images in this post are taken from the NSP website.)

Monday, June 7, 2010

Radio producer Himan Brown died last Friday at the age of 99. He was famous for producing such hits as "The Adventures of the Thin Man," "Dick Tracey," "Grand Central Station," and perhaps most memorably, "Inner Sanctum Mysteries," which opened with the sound of a creaking door. That sound became, as noted in the New York Times obituary, a signature not just of the show, but of the heyday of radio itself. (Right up there, I'm sure, with the ominous opening tones of that other radio classic, "Suspense.") I can only imagine that that creaking door was so instantly recognizable in its day that it was the very sound of excitement and mystery. (Just as the musical theme of the TV show "Lost" inspires a certain anticipation in its fans, or how the sound of a Mac or PC computer turning on inspires its own feelings -- a sense of possibility, or perhaps a dread at having to start work!) As cited in the New York Times obituary, Mr. Brown said in a 2003 interview, "I am firmly convinced that nothing visual can touch audio. I don't need 200 orchestra players doing the 'Ride of the Valkyries.' I don't need car chases. I don't need mayhem. All I need to do is creak the door open, and visually your head begins to go. The magic word is imagination." While I'm personally not so inclined to dismiss film and other visual forms, I respect what he's saying: audio cues -- such as the sound of a creaking door, fog horns to set the story in London, or a steam train to signal that you've arrived at "Grand Central Station" -- allow listeners to fill in the blanks, and create their own haunted house, their own London, their own train depot. One other such aural ellipsis occurred in Brown's series "The Thin Man" -- the sound of a lamp chain being pulled as detectives Nick and Nora Charles went to bed. Again, as reported in the NYT, Brown said, "It was as sexy as I could get." The same
principle applies when providing visual cues in a film, or narrative
cues in any kind of story -- what's not heard or shown or told is at least as important as what is. Here are a couple episodes of "Inner Sanctum Mysteries," from the Internet Archive, a fantastic resource featuring all kinds of free movies, audio, photos, and books. First, a 1941 episode of Boris Karloff reading Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Tell-Tale Heart." And here's a neat little mystery from 1945 concerning a writer, called "The Last Story." R.I.P. Hi Brown!

About Me

NOTE: PLEASE VISIT www.workingnarratives.org for weekly blog posts on storytelling and social change. "Inside Stories" is only updated very rarely now, but please read the archives for posts on the many forms of storytelling -- from journalism to genealogy to psychology to film to literature to walking tours and more. Also check out the podcast archive! You can email me at paulvdc [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks for visiting!